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Aug. 17 (UPI) — Nvidia announced on Monday that it will finance an OpenAI data center in Ohio for up to $105 billion.

The credit from Nvidia will fund the data center’s first 4.25 gigawatts in computing capacity with an option to bring 3.75 gigawatts more online. The center is slated to begin operating in Pike City, Ohio, in 2028.

The data center will be located at the PORTS-Pike Technology Campus in Pike City. It will be constructed and managed by SB Energy, a subsidiary of SoftBank Group.

Nvidia is also providing the compute power to the data center.

“This is the essential economic point: the [Load Power Supply] commitment secures a long-lived AI factory site, while the NVIDIA compute inside can be upgraded repeatedly,” NVIDIA said in a press release. “Each new generation can deliver greater production, more intelligence and better economics.”

SB Energy and SoftBank agree to build enough power supply for 10 gigawatts of energy and invest at least $4.2 billion into the regional power grid infrastructure. Nvidia has also agreed to invest $1.5 billion into SB Energy.

OpenAI said the data center will support 35,000 construction jobs through 2032. It will also support 2,500 long-term jobs.

OpenAI will pay the least on the data center as its tenant, Nvidia said.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has met with US senators to discuss his company’s upcoming models, as President Donald Trump said he is considering AI “controls” following OpenAI’s disclosure that one of its AI systems escaped containment during a security test.

“We’re looking at controls,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office in response to a question about OpenAI’s rogue agent, adding that he did not want to “restrict” AI developers from building new products.

A rogue agent escaped the handling of ChatGPT maker OpenAI and hacked the AI firm Hugging Face last week. Then, on Tuesday, it was revealed that a second company had been a target, too – Modal Labs, a New York City-based AI infrastructure firm.

The company itself was not hacked but an account of a customer hosted on Modal’s infrastructure. Modal’s chief technology officer, Akshat Bubna, did not confirm which customer was the target. The hack escaped a contained environment during a security test.

“We’re aware a Modal customer published an unauthenticated endpoint that allowed anyone on the internet to use their sandboxes for code execution,” Bubna said in a statement. “This was used by the rogue agent. Modal’s platform or isolation were not compromised in any way.”

Altman has long been accused of dismissing concerns that his products and the AI industry impact society at large, including in a recent lawsuit brought by the State of Florida that alleged the company put profits ahead of user safety.

Now, he appears to be walking back some of his past enthusiasm around AI’s pace of growth.

In a podcast called Invest Like the Best, Altman called the Hugging Face hack an “extremely sci-fi cyber incident” and later said that it was the “first security incident that I have felt very viscerally”.

“We may have to pace the rate of AI development to give ourselves enough time for society to harden around some of these new capability levels,” he said on the podcast.

On Saturday, Altman said that AI has reached “the singularity”, when AI surpasses human intelligence and becomes harder to control. He had previously said this would not be reached by 2030.

Washington meetings

Altman was in Washington, DC, this week, meeting with US Senators Raphael Warnock, a Democrat from Georgia, and Bernie Moreno, a Republican from Ohio on Wednesday. Altman told reporters that the hacking was discussed but was not the focus of the meeting.

Altman is also set to meet with Democratic Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the chamber’s Intelligence Committee.

CNBC reported that Altman is also to make a trip to the White House to meet with Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles. Last month, the president signed an executive order requesting that AI companies assess their models before full release.

Financing concerns

The hacking and meetings come alongside pressure from Wall Street amid renewed concerns about potential circular financing, following reports that semiconductor chip giant Nvidia is undergoing talks with OpenAI to provide funding guarantees for a data centre in Ohio.

The $250bn deal would help the ChatGPT owner lease a 10-gigawatt project that SB Energy, a subsidiary of SoftBank, is building in Piketon, Ohio, 109km (68 miles) south of Columbus, Ohio. It is part of a public-private partnership that allowed SoftBank to build the world’s largest AI data centre on government land owned by the US Department of Energy.

“The demand is not as big as it appears to be because, again, the companies are buying from each other using their own money to some degree, as opposed to, say, OpenAI having such tremendous demand from customers, monetising it properly, and then using customers’ money to buy Nvidia chips. They’re essentially using Nvidia’s money to buy Nvidia chips,” said Aleksandar Tomic, associate dean at Boston College.

The development comes as the Altman-led company is leaning towards an initial public offering, which, according to reporting from The New York Times last month, could be in 2027.

ChatGPT maker says an autonomous agent escaped a controlled test and accessed AI firm Hugging Face’s servers.

ChatGPT creator OpenAI has said that two of its most advanced artificial intelligence models broke out of a controlled test and hacked another AI company.

OpenAI said on Tuesday that the “unprecedented cyber incident” took place during an internal exercise meant to test its models’ cyber capabilities.

Instead, an autonomous agent powered by the AI models – the newly released GPT 5.6 Sol and an unreleased “even more capable” model – escaped the test environment and reached the open internet. It then used stolen login details and found a previously unknown security flaw to access Hugging Face servers, the company said.

OpenAI claims that the hack represented the agent going to “extreme lengths” to retrieve information that would help satisfy the testing goals.

Hugging Face cofounder Clement Delangue said the company had suspected that a frontier lab was behind the attack, and that he believed there was no malicious intent on OpenAI’s part.

“It’s quite mind-blowing that all of this happened autonomously!” he wrote, adding that it “might be the first incident of its kind”.

Greg Casar, a Democratic member of the United States House of Representatives from Texas, called the incident “alarming”.

“AI is developing extremely fast with no real regulations to keep us safe,” he said, calling for mandatory independent safety testing, mandatory disclosure of security incidents, and international cooperation.

The disclosure comes weeks after US President Donald Trump signed an executive order creating a framework to vet the national security risks of the most advanced AI systems before their public release.

Experts have repeatedly sounded the alarm over AI-enabled cyberattacks and models slipping beyond human control. Last month, AI developer Anthropic urged the industry to pause development of its most powerful systems.

July 10 (UPI) — Apple on Friday filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and former Apple employees that work their for stealing confidential product information for the artificial intelligence company’s use.

The lawsuit specifically names two former Apple employees who allegedly handed over information to OpenAI when they joined the company that related to products they worked on at their former employer, The Hill reported.

In its filing, Apple said that OpenAI has been telling employees it hires away from the company to bring design information, prototypes and other information on how it makes its products.

There are, reportedly, more than 400 former Apple employees working for OpenAI, in addition to the company’s partnership with former Apple design chief Jony Ive’s io and his effort to lead the AI company’s hardware development.

“At Apple, our teams are constantly developing breakthrough technologies to create the best products and services in the world, and protecting their work and intellectual property is something we take very seriously,” an Apple spokesperson told 9to5Mac.

“Recently, significant evidence has emerged suggesting individuals employed by OpenAI wrongfully took Apple’s secret and confidential information regarding our unreleased technologies, process and products,” the spokesperson said.

Apple alleged its former vice president of product design, Tang Tan, has told Apple employees that he is interviewing for roles at OpenAI that they should bring things from Apple headquarters for “show and tell” sessions.

OpenAI denied the allegations in a statement, saying that the company remains “focused on building innovative technology that empowers people” and has “no interest in other companies’ trade secrets.”

July 9 (UPI) — More than a dozen news organizations asked a court to sanction OpenAI for withholding evidence in lawsuits filed against the company for copyright infringement.

The New York Times, New York Daily News, The Intercept and 14 other news organizations asked a federal court on Thursday for sanctions against the artificial intelligence company for lying about its ability to provide data showing how it has used copyrighted material to train its models.

The companies had sued OpenAI for violating copyright law by using their content to create a secondary product — its AI models — without paying for it, The New York Times and Variety reported.

In court, the AI company had said it could not search training datasets and output data, but earlier this year one of the company’s employees said during a deposition that the data could be accessed.

“The evidence is in OpenAI’s training data sets and ChatGPT output logs,” the organizations said in the court filing.

“But instead of just producing that evidence at the start of the case and focusing on the merits of its fair use defense, OpenAI chose obstruction,” they said.

In addition to accusing OpenAI of lying about searching for the organizations’ content in its data, they allege that the company deleted data logs, which would violate a court order to preserve relevant evidence.

An attorney for the organizations said in a statement that OpenAI had claimed that searching its ChatGPT outputs was “infeasible, burdensome and invasive of users’ privacy” but then lied about having already done searches.

OpenAI called the news organizations’ allegations in the filing “blatantly false,” and said that its use of their content falls under “the long-established principles of fair use.”

WASHINGTON — In congressional races across the country, a new crop of super PACs is taking to the air with millions of dollars worth of advertisements to sway voters.

“President Trump said it best, ‘Celeste Maloy will never let you down,’” says one advertisement supporting the Utah Republican representative in her upcoming primary election.

“Standing up to big pharma, fighting for local jobs, Val Hoyle doesn’t back down,” says an ad backing the Oregon Democratic representative ahead of her primary victory last month.

The super PACs have nondescript names — such as Jobs and Democracy PAC and American Mission — and the text is so generic that it almost seems to have been created by artificial intelligence.

That isn’t so far off the mark. The AI industry has funded the ads.

One network of super PACs is linked to Anthropic, maker of the popular AI tool Claude, and the other to Open AI, maker of ChatGPT.

They have been among the most prolific political spenders so far in the 2026 midterm elections, splashing out more than $37 million to date to influence races across the country and making the groups among the biggest outside spenders so far in congressional races. That number could grow exponentially as campaign season heats up closer to the November election — and as the Silicon Valley giants prepare initial pubic offerings that are poised to raise billions of dollars for the companies and their executives.

The AI political spending boom comes as emerging technology companies have become increasingly “comfortable with using their power to achieve a political goal,” said Adam Kovacevich, a former Google public policy executive and founder of Chamber of Progress, a technology trade group with a progressive orientation.

The leading AI companies have a history.

Anthropic was formed by former OpenAI employees who were concerned that the company was less focused on its original mission to safely harness the power of AI.

The companies are now the leading drivers of the burgeoning AI industry, and their competing views about how the technology should be regulated are playing out in a wide-ranging political ad spending war that has targeted congressional races in big cities and rural areas alike.

OpenAI thinks AI should be regulated solely at the federal level.

Anthropic calls for more stringent regulation and supports efforts by states such as New York and California that have passed more aggressive AI laws.

The groups spending in these races are super PACs, which are able to raise and spend unlimited amounts of money in federal races thanks to the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision.

In some races, the AI-backed political groups have spent more than the candidates they are backing.

“There was no way as a grassroots person that I could compete with that kind of money,” said Al Olszewski, whose opponent in a Montana Republican congressional primary beat him by 30 points after getting a boost from $877,000 in ads from a super PAC backed by OpenAI’s co-founder. “I got crushed.”

The AI behemoths have emphasized that they are independent from the political groups.

One group counts $25 million in support from OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman and his wife, Anna, alongside $100 million tied to one of Silicon Valley’s biggest venture capital firms, which holds a large stake in OpenAI. The global policy chief for OpenAI was reportedly involved in conceiving the group.

The other side has gotten $20 million from Anthropic and millions more from donors whose identities are not public.

This anonymous political cash is commonly known as dark money, and its prevalence is growing.

(Los Angeles Times photo illustration; source photos courtesy of the Tech Oversight Project)

“This has become very normalized now,” said Brendan Glavin, director of insights at OpenSecrets, which tracks campaign spending. “In 2024, we tracked over $1 billion in dark money.”

That total was $350 million higher than the previous presidential election.

The crypto playbook

The political activity of these AI companies and executives reflects a dramatic shift from how emerging technology companies have historically engaged with politics.

Google, for example, didn’t hire its first in-house Washington lobbyist until after the company had gone public in 2005.

“I think that for a long time, the tech industry lobbying strategy was just ‘leave us alone,’” Kovacevich said.

He sees the spending by these AI-linked super PACs as following the recent playbook developed by the cryptocurrency industry, which has funded the only network of political groups that has spent more on congressional races this year than those linked to OpenAI.

“I think what the crypto industry realized was that there’s no substitute for building up political power,” Kovacevich said.

The political stakes for these technology companies are significant.

“AI policy is far from settled,” said Asad Ramzanali, the former deputy director for strategy in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy during the Biden administration and the director of artificial intelligence and technology policy at the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator.

Earlier this month, the Trump administration banned foreign nationals from using the most powerful AI model developed by Anthropic — and even banned the company’s own employees from it — which forced the company to restrict access for all users.

Manhattan matchup

The two super PAC networks have largely shied away from producing ads that mention AI and have mostly chosen to avoid competing against each other in the same races.

There’s one big exception.

In the marquee Manhattan Democratic congressional primary to replace retiring Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), each side has spent millions of dollars.

While the field includes Kennedy scion and social media star Jake Schlossberg and former Republican turned Trump critic George Conway, the target of all the AI-backed spending has been Alex Bores, a former Palantir data scientist who now serves in the New York state Assembly.

New York congressional candidate sponsored a state measure Bores requiring major AI companies to be transparent about their safety protocols and promptly report safety incidents.

(Yuki Iwamura / Associated Press)

That’s because Bores sponsored a state bill, known as the RAISE Act, that requires major AI companies to be transparent about their safety protocols and promptly report safety incidents. The bill was signed into law in December 2025.

The ads sponsored by the group tied to OpenAI, which has spent more than $7.5 million in the race, paint Bores as someone who can’t be trusted.

They cite his support from other tech billionaires, including former crypto mogul and convicted financial fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried, whose super PAC spent $100,000 to support Bores in 2022 when he first ran for New York Assembly.

“Is that really who should be shaping AI safety for our kids?” one ad asks.

An ad sponsored by the Anthropic-backed network, which has also spent more than $7.5 million supporting Bores, makes the case that the bill he sponsored is exactly why he should be elected.

“As a computer engineer, Alex Bores saw how dangerous unregulated AI could be and he wrote New York’s RAISE Act to put real safeguards on A.I. and hold big tech accountable,” the ad says.

The AI ad barrage in New York has even included what might be considered a kumbaya moment in the ad wars — another super PAC created to support Bores is most heavily backed by both an employee of Anthropic and an employee of OpenAI, who both focus on AI safety.

The group, Dream NYC, has spent more than $1.7 million supporting Bores.

Bores and fellow New York State Assemblymember Micah Lasher have been atop the most recent polls in the race ahead of the June 23 primary.

A general view of businesses in St. George, Utah, on Wednesday.

(Ian Maule / For The Times)

Rural Republicans

For voters in many parts of the country, the debate over AI policy has played out locally as a debate over the massive data centers required to power the technology.

In Utah, a proposed data center in Box Elder County, backed by “Shark Tank” television personality Kevin O’Leary, has generated controversy because of questions about its impact on resources in the drought-prone state and its environmental effect on the nearby Great Salt Lake.

In the state’s most competitive Republican congressional primary — the vast, newly drawn 3rd Congressional District — both candidates expressed concerns about how the project has been developed and called for greater transparency in this plan and for future data centers in the state.

Utah congressional candidates Phil Lyman and Celeste Maloy in a debate on June 1. A super PAC backed by Anthropic has spent more than $920,000 to support Maloy.

(Rick Egan / Pool / The Salt Lake Tribune Via Associated Press)

Despite their similar position on the project, a super PAC backed by Anthropic has spent more than $950,000 to support Maloy, who is running in the new district after the boundaries of her old district changed.

“It’s a lot of money to throw at a race,” said her opponent, Phil Lyman, a former conservative Republican state Representative who ran to the right of Utah Republican Gov. Spencer Cox in an unsuccessful primary challenge in 2024.

Lyman insists he is no AI skeptic.

“I’m not anti data centers, I’m pro-transparency,” he said. “I think the future is bright with AI.”

The group said it is backing Maloy because it sees her as “someone who’s worked the issue” of AI regulation and who “has demonstrated leadership” with Republicans in Congress.

Maloy’s campaign didn’t respond to request for comment.

Utah congressional candidate Phil Lyman speaks during a Cottage Meeting at the SunRiver Community Center Ballroom in St. George, Utah, on Wednesday.

(Ian Maule / For The Times)

But Lyman suspects the group’s support for Maloy ahead of their June 23 primary has more to do with old-fashioned politics than any emerging technology.

One of the two co-founders of the political group is Chris Stewart, Maloy’s predecessor in Congress.

“Everything that they’re doing feels very coordinated,” Lyman said. “It makes you wonder if he’s still really controlling that seat.”

Published on 16/06/2026 – 14:21 GMT+2•Updated
14:25

SpaceX is pushing deeper into AI with its largest acquisition yet, striking a $60 billion (€51.7bn) all-stock agreement to buy Anysphere, the developer of the AI coding assistant Cursor.

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The purchase, announced on Tuesday, is intended to strengthen SpaceX’s position in the enterprise AI market, where rivals such as OpenAI and Anthropic have found early commercial traction.

Anysphere is a San Francisco startup that uses AI to automate large parts of software development, and its Cursor tool is widely used by programmers.

According to a regulatory filing, the two sides signed a merger agreement under which a SpaceX subsidiary, X67 Inc., will merge into Anysphere, leaving Cursor as a wholly owned subsidiary.

The merger is expected to close in the third quarter of this year, subject to regulatory approval.

The deal lands barely a week after Elon Musk’s company completed a blockbuster listing, and marks an aggressive move beyond rockets and satellites into enterprise AI software.

At the time of writing, SpaceX shares were trading a few cents below $200 in premarket trading, up more than 4% from Monday’s close and roughly 50% higher than its IPO price of $135.

Tuesday’s rally could see SpaceX overtake Amazon by market capitalisation if gains hold through the session.

The acquisition follows an option SpaceX secured in April, when it agreed to either acquire Cursor for $60 billion (€51.7bn) later in the year or pay $10 billion (€8.6bn) for a narrower partnership to provide compute.

Founded in 2022, Cursor has grown quickly, reporting roughly $2.6 billion (€2.2bn) in annualised business-to-business revenue, according to company data shared with Reuters this month.

The firm had previously raised more than $3 billion (€2.5bn) from backers including Nvidia and OpenAI.

SpaceX merged with Musk’s chatbot venture xAI in February, and this new deal could hand xAI a stronger position in AI-assisted coding, an area where it has trailed competitors, while giving Cursor access to far greater computing power.

The lawsuit originally filed in September focused on broader alleged misappropriation of confidential information.

A United States federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit by Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI that accused rival Sam Altman’s OpenAI of stealing trade secrets for chatbots.

US District Judge Rita Lin in San Francisco said on Monday that xAI failed to show that OpenAI induced former xAI senior engineer Xuechen Li to divulge confidential information related to its Grok chatbot, or that OpenAI engineers knew Li might have disclosed any.

Lin dismissed the lawsuit with prejudice, saying it would be “futile” to continue. She dismissed an earlier version in February. The lawsuit originally filed last September focused on broader alleged misappropriation of confidential information, including source code, by xAI employees who left for jobs at OpenAI.

Monday’s decision is Musk’s second legal loss against OpenAI in four weeks.

On May 18, a federal jury ruled against Musk, the world’s richest person, in his $150bn lawsuit accusing OpenAI and Altman of “stealing a charity” by betraying the company’s original mission as a nonprofit to enrich themselves.

The xAI business is part of Musk’s rocket, satellite and AI company SpaceX.

Lawyers for xAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment. OpenAI and its lawyers did not immediately respond to similar requests.

Discussing past work

The amended complaint focused on a presentation that Li gave while OpenAI was recruiting him.

Musk’s company said OpenAI wanted secrets related to the July 2025 release of Grok 4, knowing its forthcoming update to ChatGPT “could not compete” on complex reasoning, and because OpenAI was “lagging” in reinforcement learning and post-training techniques that Li understood.

But the judge said asking job candidates to discuss their prior work was routine, and one could not infer that OpenAI pushed Li to leak anything confidential.

“To hold otherwise would potentially expose employers to liability any time they inquire about a candidate’s past work,” Lin wrote.

OpenAI has said Li never worked for the company and that it never acquired xAI secrets.

In seeking dismissal, lawyers for OpenAI wrote: “OpenAI does not need or want anyone’s trade secrets, especially not from xAI, which is failing in the marketplace and hemorrhaging talent.”

Li is being sued separately by xAI and has denied wrongdoing.

Published on
15/06/2026 – 12:06 GMT+2

OpenAI is facing a fresh regulatory challenge after a group of state attorneys general demanded a wide range of documents about how ChatGPT protects the people who use it, a move that arrives at a delicate moment for the company as it lays the groundwork for a potential public listing.

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The investigation, which arrived just days after OpenAI filed confidential paperwork for an IPO, threatens to complicate a listing that some analysts expect will value the ChatGPT maker at roughly $1 trillion (€861bn).

According to The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the matter, OpenAI received the subpoena on Friday from a group of states, with the inquiry led by New York’s attorney general.

Officials are requesting material covering the company’s advertising practices, how it keeps people using its service, its handling of consumer and health data, and its policies towards minors and older adults.

OpenAI said it would engage with the offices behind the request and stressed that protections are already built into its product.

A spokesperson stated that the company takes the concerns raised by the attorneys general “seriously” and works to bring the benefits of the technology to people responsibly. However, the firm has not confirmed which other US states are taking part.

Mounting legal pressure

The subpoena adds to a growing list of legal headaches.

Last Thursday, a Canadian woman sued OpenAI, blaming ChatGPT for her daughter’s suicide. Earlier in June, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier filed suit against the company and CEO Sam Altman after two shootings in which the alleged attackers reportedly used the chatbot to plan their crimes.

OpenAI responded that its models repeatedly urged the individuals to seek help from mental health professionals and that it cooperated with the police in both cases.

These are not the first courtroom tests of the year for OpenAI.

In May, a federal jury in Oakland, California took less than two hours to reject Elon Musk’s lawsuit accusing Altman of abandoning the firm’s nonprofit roots, finding he had filed too late. Musk, who called the ruling a “calendar technicality”, said he would appeal.

The clampdown also extends across the industry.

European regulators have opened investigations into Musk’s rival chatbot Grok over antisemitic and sexualised content, including deepfake images.

Anthropic, also preparing an IPO, was told by the Trump administration to restrict two of its models abroad on national security grounds, illustrating how AI governance has become an increasingly fraught political battleground.

Additional sources • AP

June 8 (UPI) — Artificial intelligence company OpenAI confidentially filed for an initial public offering Monday, becoming the third in a well-known trio of U.S. AI companies to do so in the past few weeks.

Rival AI company Anthropic filed for an IPO on June 1, and SpaceX (which merged with xAI, also owned by Elon Musk) filed in late May. SpaceX’s debut is set for Friday. All three are expected to be very lucrative for early investors, as they have valuations around $1 trillion, Axios reported.

OpenAI said in a post that there has been no decision on the IPO’s timing yet.

“It may be a while because there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company,” the post said.

The company has had both successes and trials in recent months, CNN reported. Musk lost a lawsuit against it in mid-May because of the statute of limitations, and the company has expanded ChatGPT options and other AI tools and programs.

However, the company and founder/CEO Sam Altman are also facing lawsuits because of ChatGPT’s role in recent shootings and other issues. Florida announced last week that it is suing the company and Altman, claiming the company chose “profits over public safety” in creating a dangerous product in the form of ChatGPT. The state also has an ongoing criminal investigation into the company.

Individuals including the family members of those killed or injured in a recent school shooting have also sued, saying that the company should have warned authorities about the shooter’s interactions with ChatGPT.

June 1 (UPI) — Florida’s attorney general announced Monday that the state is suing OpenAI and its founder and CEO, Sam Altman, saying the company chose “profits over public safety” in creating a dangerous product in the form of ChatGPT. It is the first state to sue the company over these design and safety concerns.

“The rise of OpenAI is attributable to a web of deceit and the exploitation of users (including Floridians), leveraging their data and safety to boost OpenAI’s market value at unacceptable costs,” the complaint filed by Attorney General James Uthmeier said, NBC News reported.

The lawsuit claims that OpenAI violated Florida’s rules on deceptive business practices and knew that its chatbot could be dangerous to children and others through actions such as providing “harmful information such as tips on eating disorders, self-harm and mass murder,” The New York Times reported. It says OpenAI presents “a great danger of addiction, cognitive decline, suicide, violence and related harms.”

The civil suit is separate from Florida’s ongoing criminal investigation into OpenAI, which Uthmeier openedin April. It includes multiple counts of deceptive and unfair trade practices, negligence, violations of product liability laws, fraudulent misrepresentation and causing a public nuisance.

OpenAI representatives have not yet commented on this lawsuit. Representatives have said in response to past claims that the company designs its systems with safety in mind and that there are “safeguards in placeto help people, especially teens, when conversations turn sensitive.”

“We continue improving ChatGPT’s training to recognize and respond to signs of mental and emotional distress, de-escalate conversations and guide people toward real-world support,” the company said in a prior statement.

The lawsuits also mentions OpenAI’s connections to a mass shooting at Florida State University and killings at the University of South Florida. In both cases, suspects asked ChatGPT for information connected to the attacks.

President Trump signed an executive order on artificial intelligence Tuesday, less than two weeks after postponing a White House ceremony over his concerns that a similar policy could dull America’s edge on AI technology.

The order establishes a framework for the federal government to vet the national security risks of the most advanced AI systems for up to a month before their public release. The government will be able to work with trusted partners “that will have early access to covered frontier models to promote secure innovation and strengthen the cybersecurity of critical infrastructure,” the order says.

It was not immediately clear to what extent the order differed from the one he declined to sign on May 21.

Trump canceled an Oval Office event with tech industry executives last month because he did not like what he saw in the earlier version of the order’s text. “We’re leading China, we’re leading everybody, and I don’t want to do anything that’s going to get in the way of that lead,” Trump told reporters at the time.

That directive was characterized as a voluntary collaboration with participating U.S.-based tech companies, including Anthropic, OpenAI and Google.

O’Brien writes for the Associated Press.

May 27 (Asia Today) — OpenAI said Wednesday it will expand artificial intelligence-based cyber defense cooperation with the South Korean government, public agencies and companies in key industries.

The company announced its Korea Cyber Action Plan during a press conference at the JW Marriott Hotel in Seoul’s Seocho District. The plan is designed to give government agencies, public institutions and companies broader access to OpenAI’s advanced AI cyber models.

Jason Kwon, OpenAI’s chief strategy officer, said AI has entered a third stage as an “intelligence utility,” becoming core infrastructure for the economy and society after earlier phases focused on capability breakthroughs and broader access.

Kwon said South Korea is well positioned to adopt AI because it is a digital-first society that quickly embraces new technologies and has a “full-stack economy” with global semiconductor companies including Samsung Electronics and SK hynix.

“Advanced cyber AI capabilities should not remain in the hands of only a few,” Kwon said. “Korea’s key defenders should be able to use them to strengthen collective security and public safety.”

“Korea is a very important country for OpenAI,” he said. “We hope to become an important partner in Korea’s AI transformation and in strengthening national resilience.”

The Korea Cyber Action Plan is part of Daybreak, OpenAI’s global cybersecurity initiative that aims to build security into systems from the earliest stages of development. OpenAI says Daybreak is designed to help cyber defenders identify threats, generate patches and verify fixes across code and systems.

A key part of the plan is expanding Trusted Access for Cyber, a program that gives verified defensive users access to specialized cyber AI models. OpenAI said in April it was scaling the program to thousands of verified individual defenders and hundreds of teams responsible for protecting critical software.

Kwon said access for the South Korean government to the government version of the program is in its final stage. He said OpenAI is also discussing adoption of the private-sector program with several Korean companies.

Asked about potential misuse of cyber models and data leakage risks, Kwon said OpenAI is controlling risk by granting access only to “trusted defenders” who go through strict verification.

He also said OpenAI supports data residency in South Korea, allowing data to be processed on domestic servers. Public agencies and companies may also choose an option in which data is not stored at all, he said.

Kwon said OpenAI has begun talks with the Korea AI Safety Institute under the Ministry of Science and ICT. He said the company will draw on its experience working with AI safety institutes in the United States and Britain to help South Korea build its own model evaluation capabilities.

Before Wednesday’s announcement, OpenAI had been deepening cooperation with South Korea’s public sector. On May 18, Sasha Baker, OpenAI’s head of national security policy, visited South Korea and demonstrated the company’s latest cyber-focused models to major agencies including the science ministry, the Foreign Ministry, the Interior Ministry, the Financial Services Commission and the National AI Strategy Committee.

On Tuesday, Kwon met with Ryu Je-myung, second vice minister of science and ICT, to discuss AI security cooperation. OpenAI also signed memorandums of understanding with Korea Water Resources Corp. and Korea Technology Finance Corp.

Kwon emphasized the company’s expectations for the Korean market.

“Korea is a country with very favorable conditions to turn AI into national competitiveness,” he said. “Based on ChatGPT, Korea is already one of the top 10 markets globally, and the speed of AI adoption is very fast.”

OpenAI said use of Codex in South Korea is also growing quickly. Weekly active users of ChatGPT Codex in the country have increased tenfold since the beginning of the year, placing South Korea among the top five countries by usage.

More than half of the requests come from non-development work such as document writing, analysis, research and operations, showing the potential for wider enterprise use, the company said.

Kwon said changes in OpenAI’s partnership with Microsoft have made it possible to provide OpenAI API services through a wider range of cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services, and that enterprise growth is expected to accelerate.

On pricing for enterprise services, Kwon said consumer subscriptions and corporate services are different, and that business customers already use contract-based pricing. Over the long term, he said OpenAI aims to provide stronger AI performance at the same cost or lower unit prices so more users can benefit.

— Reported by Asia Today; translated by UPI

© Asia Today. Unauthorized reproduction or redistribution prohibited.

Original Korean report: https://www.asiatoday.co.kr/kn/view.php?key=20260527010008011